Mr. Forte is a very funny guy but often not when he’s trying to be.  I mean, he can’t tell a joke to save his life:  forgets the punch line, moves it to the beginning, gets the inflection wrong and has terrible timing.  What’s even more odd is this is a guy who can give a mesmerizing 30-minute speech.  Without a single note.  Who could convince the twelve people on a jury that the moon really is made of green cheese and has done just that, hundreds of times.  If this were a physics class, he would be The Mot (that’s his first name spelled backward) Paradox.

            It is an ongoing source of amazement (and sometimes amusement) what a paradox much of his life has been.  He is the oldest child of an Irish railroad worker and the formidable, if short, daughter of the German Grundhoefers, all recent immigrants to Chicago in the early 1900s, and he grew up in the rough-and-tumble of the South Side.  His dad was a handy guy, could make or fix most anything, who climbed and trimmed huge trees when he was in his eighties.  If our Mot had ever gotten his hands on a chainsaw, he and everyone nearby would have been legless, if left alive.

            As intelligent as he is, his brain is lacking those pieces that understand logical progression and spatial relationships.  As a kid, he tried and tried to put together model airplanes, inevitably gluing the wrong little balsa wood pieces together or gluing them to his fingers or his shirt or cutting the wing struts too short.  He loved airplanes and would save his pennies to buy another one, carefully laying all the pieces out, and then it would happen in exactly the same way again.  Every… single … time.  Being afraid of knives probably didn’t help.  Which also helps explain his almost total lack of knowledge about our kitchen.

            I often have a big knife in my hand when I’m cooking, and he hesitates for a nanosecond every time he walks in there.  I can see him thinking, “You can’t be too careful,” one of his favorite expressions.  We’ve had a rocky patch or two in the 40 years since we fell in love, and he’s not sure there isn’t one last transgression I might have just found out about.  The truth is, I've always known everything but I’m not telling him that.  It’s fun to see him flinch.

            So, because being in the kitchen is a little edgy (get it?) for him – plus the fact that he’s adorable and charming and every woman in his life has happily cooked his meals – he spends almost no time in there and, hence, doesn’t know where anything is.  When I leave town, which is often, I make sure there are Cheerios, milk, bread, turkey or ham and cheddar cheese from the deli, mustard, red wine, oatmeal raisin cookies from the bakery and Hershey’s chocolate (the raisins and mustard count in the fruit/vegetable food group).  Each item must be in exactly the same location every time – middle shelf of the fridge, e.g. – or it is rendered invisible. 

            We have joked for years that we would both starve to death if I were too sick to crawl to the kitchen.  The authorities would find our lifeless bodies:  me sprawled on our bed, him collapsed in front of the fully stocked pantry without a can opener or in front of the refrigerator with all the food on the wrong shelves.

            Back to the Mr. Forte Funny Story o’ the Day.  This happened a long time ago, when cell phones were brand new and looked kinda like the one Maxwell Smart used to have in his shoe.  Remember, those huge things with the fixed hard rubber antennas that weighed like seven pounds?  Well, because he was always on call to go to court, his firm insisted he have one, bought it for him and showed him how to turn it on.  He took it with him whenever he left his office, and he called his secretary on breaks during depositions or when he was traveling.  He would carefully peer at it, push the On/Off button, dial the number, talk and then turn it off.

            I should preface this by saying Mr. Forte hates talking on the phone.  Before email, which is now everyone’s preferred method of communication, he spent most of his time leaving messages for people or returning calls if he wasn’t in front of a judge.  If he was in his office, he was on the phone with a grimace on his handsome face.  He’s not a fan of email either but will grudgingly admit that at least it has dramatically reduced his trapped-on-the-phone time.

            After the death of his original shoe-ish phone and a few years later into the cell-phone age, I was telling him that I was heading over to Verizon to get us new phones because they were having a deal and since we would have two lines, we would get …

            With a puzzled look he said, “Two lines?” 

            “Right, and that way it’s …” 

            “Do you mean phone lines?” he asked.           

            “Sure, two phone lines, and so …” 

            “Do I have a phone line now?” 

            “Of course you have a phone line.  You’ve had a phone line ever since you’ve had a cell phone.  It’s a phone.  You know, a telephone.” 

            There was a pause. 

            “You mean it has a number?” 

            “Of course, silly.  They all have numbers,” I said. 

            “Do you know your number?”  He looked suspiciously at me. 

            “Yes.” 

            “Do you know my number?” 

            “Yes,” I answered. 

            “How do you know my number?” 

            “I got you the phone.  They tell you the number when you sign up,” I said.           

            “Why didn’t you tell me my number?” 

            “Because you don’t need to know the number if you’re never going to give it to anyone.  You don’t want people calling you, do you?”  I asked. 

            “No,” he said, horrified.  “Why would I want that?” 

            “Exactly.  That’s why you didn’t need to know the number,” I said.           

            There was a longer pause. 

            “But since you know the number, you could call me,” he stated. 

            “Right, I could.” 

            Another pause. 

            “And my phone would ring?” 

            “Yes,” I said, wondering where this was going. 

            He sat, thinking. 

            “In the car?”  he said, accompanied by a look of pure terror, as though I had just announced that a nuclear warhead would be launched if he pushed the wrong button on his phone. 

            I was really trying not to laugh. 

            “Do you tell people your number?” he asked, wide-eyed. 

            “Sure.”

            “Why?” 

            “So they can call me,” I said. 

            “Well, that just makes no sense at all,” he said.

            He looked at me and cocked his head a little, like a dog will when he’s not quite sure if you said something that sounded like “treat” or not, and we left it at that. 

           If you liked this, wait ‘til you hear the one about the mountain lion.

image from: https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/spy-fi-archives/item15.html